Working for a big company can be interesting at times. Currently I am receiving Emails addressed to the whole company about 怪電話 mysterious strange phone calls.
By now almost everyone in our company, who has a company phone, has received at least one such call. The caller will try to get as many information out of the person as possible including the name of certain managers, the number of employees, details about our products, etc.
Now the Emails talk about the calling company never telling the answering person their name or telephone number and only referencing themselves by an internet address, which is obviously fraud. They are very careful not to reveal any information about themselves while trying to get as much information out of us. The Japanese staff has been advised to answer
"Sorry the respective person in charge is not present at the moment, please give me your name and telephone number and we will call you back". Usually however the caller don't give this information or give wrong numbers.
Talking to some persons at the company I found out that these calls most probably originate from a company in Canada who does an espionage attack per phone and Email on us. That means they take our direct dialing number and consecutively replace the last four digits to reach own company everyone having their own company phone. The company would give us a web address similar to the address of Community Media Canada (http://www.communitymedia.ca/), yet apparently it does not really belong to this group. The address they gave us is (http://www.communitymediacanada.com/) which leads to a fraud site. So curiously enough whatever company is spying on us uses an existing Canadian company as a cloak.
Now it gets interesting, when the called reveals his name and shows some potentiality in revealing information, they will figure out her/his Email and try contacting her/him per Email (because the downside in telephone contact is, that many people can hear you talking). In the Email, depending on the reactions, they can actually go as far as offering you asylum in Canada and a lot of money, if you should decide to betray your company and take its secret with you. Alternatively they will try to keep you in the company as long as possible working as a spy for them and receiving large pay checks from overseas.
It feels like working for some secret agency at the moment, with all the fuss about these callers and the reactions of the people here. Yet I think that the Canadian company will not be successful. A Japanese person betraying his company alone is unbelievable enough, but a Japanese leaving Japan and thus his family for money and living in Canada from then on, is even more unbelievable. Usually Japanese have very strong bonds to their home and accepting this deal would make them a wanted criminal in Japan rendering them unable to return home ever.
Even still the espionage attack will reveal some information to the attacker. They for example can guess the number of employees based on the number of working phones. And they can trick certain way too friendly Japanese employees in unintentionally revealing some information.
Finally since everything comes from overseas and since we can not pinpoint the calling company, we have no weapons to defend ourselves and are rendered almost helpless against such attacks.
But they provide excellent material for work hour company gossip ^_^
Espionage Defense Force Executive Director
mika
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